Situated on the northern frontier of Spain’s American empire, the Kingdom of New Mexico was an essential military outpost and center of missionary activity. Early attempts to conquer and settle the region by Francisco Vazquez Coronado in 1540-42 were dismal failures, but after a series of expeditions by Franciscan missionaries in 1581-82 mapped out the region and its peoples, the Spanish were able to conquer the regions along the Rio Grande River in 1598. Led by Juan de Onate, the 1598 entrada established a Spanish presence in New Mexico that would last until the Spanish were driven out in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. An important part of every Spanish entrada was religious conversion, and Franciscan friars immediately began proselytizing PuEBLO Indians in Taos, San Juan, and other settled communities, while de Onate’s soldiers dealt severely with Natives who resisted the Spanish presence. European hegemony became clear in the burning of the Pueblo of Acoma in 1598, along with the brutal punishments meted out to its inhabitants. After this demonstration of Spanish ruthlessness, most communities in the Rio Grande Valley chose to cooperate with the Spaniards rather than fight. Those farther away from the Spanish, such as the Hopi and Pima in western New Mexico and eastern Arizona, maintained their independence. Once established, the Spanish began demanding tribute, while the friars established MISSIONS and insisted that the Pueblo abandon their traditions in favor of Christianity.
From its creation, the colony of New Mexico was charged with producing wealth for the Crown through mines, Indian tribute, and other revenue-generating activities. It was also seen as a forum for evangelization, an ideal source of souls for the Franciscan missionaries who accompanied Onate’s military force. Perhaps most importantly, New Mexico was settled in order to reinforce Spanish territorial claims against French and English explorers and merchants who were beginning to trade with the Indians of the region. The colony was also designed to serve as the first line of defense for the rich and vulnerable mining districts of north-central New Spain. Once in control, the friars established mission pueblos designed to congregate Indians around a single urban setting. After 1598 many Indian communities were forcibly moved to the missions and taught European forms of AGRICULTURE. Many resisted these disruptions and either fought, immediately fled, or ultimately abandoned the missions after a few seasons.
The New Mexico colony faced serious problems from the start. Little mineral wealth was found in the region, and in 1605, the viceroy, 2,000 miles away in Mexico City, recommended withdrawal from New Mexico. The Franciscans, however, refused to leave because they did not want to abandon their successes; by the early 1600s, they had baptized thousands of Pueblo Indians. Deeply committed to proselytizing their Indian “subjects,” the Crown allowed the Franciscans to remain in New Mexico, which became a Crown colony in 1608. Santa Fe became its capital the following year. From this date, missionary activity became central to the colony. Even so, the colony retained significant numbers of soldiers and settlers who competed for Indian LABOR with the missionaries. By the early 17th century, approximately 3,000 colonists and friars resided in New Mexico, and they depended almost entirely on a harsh labor regime forced on Indians for agriculture, ranching, tanning, and other activities. These early decades were also characterized by struggles between civil and religious authorities over who controlled the Indian population and who could demand labor and tribute, a complex conflict in which the friars even excommunicated a governor.
Conflicts between the friars and indigenous peoples generated Indian revolts as early as the 1640s. In the late 1670s, as a population decimated by European viruses and alienated by harsh demands by the colonizers grew increasingly desperate, a diverse group of Indian pueblos came together to plan a concerted uprising against their colonizers. The PuEBLO REVOLT, which began on August 10, 1680, drove the Spanish out of the region for 12 years. Returning to the region in the early 1690s, the Spanish once again took advantage of internal divisions to subdue most of New Mexico by 1694, failing to reconquer only the Hopi of Arizona.
San Miguel Chapel, Sante Fe, New Mexico, the oldest church structure in the United States. Its original adobe walls were built in about 1610. (Wikipedia)
After the reconquest, New Mexico became increasingly important as a line of defense against attacks both by other European powers and by Indians. The presence of the French on the edges of the Great Plains in the early 18th century pushed groups such as the Comanche and Pawnee southward into Apache areas, who, in turn, raided Spanish settlements frequently. In response, the Spanish built a string of presidios running from Arizona to Texas. Santa Fe’s presidio, with 100 soldiers, was beyond the line of defense.
The population of the colony also slowly grew, from 14,000 in 1693 to 16,500 in 1760. Notably, this growth occurred almost entirely among inhabitants of European ancestry, who increased from 3,000 in 1693 to 7,700 in 1760. Simultaneously, the number of Indians living in the colony actually declined. European settlers concentrated in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Santa Cruz, and in farming settlements along the Rio Grande. These regions also included large numbers of mestizos and detribalized Indians (gentzaro slaves) as well as a great many tribute-and labor-paying Pueblo Indians who lived beyond the settlements. During the 18th century, the Pueblo increasingly abandoned their villages, transformed their traditional ways to more closely approximate European customs (including a change from matrilineal to patrilineal kinship), and reorganized their religious rituals under an increasingly synthetic series of religious practices. By the 1750s these cultural changes led to the creation of a distinctive Vicino culture that would characterize life in New Mexico for the next century.
Further reading: Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991).
—Alexander Dawson and Ronald Schultz
World History
